Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

Buddddddddy, I don't think you're trolling and I like you a lot. I think you are WAY over-inspecting something because something about it makes you uncomfortable and you want to turn away the full point of the argument against it, even if you can only splinter off a little bit of it, it seems like a "win." That kind of rhetorical hair-splitting is something we know well around here and we've probably all done it. It's just your turn today. We still love you.

I just wanna echo something that in orbit said above.

Things I've been saying are not my original ideas; I did not come up with them on mine own. These are ideas that I have heard from (and in some cases discussed with) Women of Colour, and I want to acknowledge their role in shaping - and relearning - my thoughts on these issues. Most of them are women I follow on twitter through a shared interest in music or pop culture, who have opened my eyes - J., Rana, Chitra, Bim, Reni and others. These ideas come from blogosphere people like Sara Ahmed and Flavia Dzodan. These ideas come from reading books by bell hooks and Angela Y Davis and a primer on Black Feminist Thought which included many other writers (like Audrey Lorde) whose works are harder to find in the UK. They come from blogs like Gradient Lair and Racalicious and Crunk Feminist Collective. And many other tweeters and writers whose names are escaping me right now but whose words and experiences are cycled constantly by the labour of women of colour. These are their ideas, I am not claiming them as mine own.

It's not that I don't appreciate a shout-out from mattresslessness, it's that I am not the one who deserves it. I agree with these arguments, I support them - and I am also painfully aware that as a white woman, I am far more likely to be listened to by white men than women of colour are.

Also who the fuck cares what his intentions were? I don't. The product he created is racist, it is undeniably influenced by unexamined racist beliefs whether the creator knowingly espouses them or not. Okay. No one cares. The influence of the product is to increase inequality, or to privilege one kind of "equality" against another kind in a perceived zero-sum game. That's shitty anti-oppression work. If anti-oppression struggle is your job and you put out that, you're doing a bad job at your job. Do better.

but i thought it was pretty non-controversial to say that no one can actually prove that he had a bunch of footage and edited it out.

http://gothamist.com/2014/10/30/how_the_100_catcalls_in_10_hours_st.php

Directly from his own statement:

Was any street harassment footage cut out of the edit? So in total, we had by my estimates 108 street harassments that took place during the shoot. Of that, we got both the quality audio and video we needed to have a scene, for roughly 30 to 40 scenes. The drop off came mostly through the difficulty of this shoot. Not only did we need quality in both pieces, but we frequently missed a shot because of noise, people standing in front of the camera, technical issues (batteries dying, for example), rain/wind, etc.

Since this video was also meant to serve as a viral video, it needed to be short due to internet audience attention spans. So we whittled away at this until we had the video just a tick under two minutes. This left us with just 20 scenes total, 18 of which have someone visible on camera.

[...]

Do you have a response to the race comments/criticisms? I think the biggest misconception here is not understanding how inaccurate a sample size of 18 people is going to be, out of the tens of thousands of cat calls that happen. For example, the two dudes that stalk her, they alone account for 50% of the video, wildly swinging the scales with just two guys. What if they were Italian, or Russian? Does that mean that we're saying or implying that 50% of Italians are responsible for cat calling?

The biggest problem is people are acting like this is a survey, and there's no way anyone would trust such a survey of 18 people, especially with two people making up half the vote. There's no way that's going to be accurate. Like, there's no Asian men in this video either, are we saying that Asians don't catcall? People are drawing way too broad of conclusions. We filmed for a short period of time, we captured a few dozen interactions, and since we knew that they wouldn't necessarily represent the full demographics, we talk at the end of the video about how people from all backgrounds catcalled during our shoot.

Also I can even walk you through it, but there were 6 or 7 white guys in this video that catcalled, that's 33% to 40% percent. It's tricky picking everyone out because all their faces are blurred, which has only lead to more confusion. Additionally, their scenes were short, where those two guys who were non-white, they alone ate up half the video. So the run times yes, heavily portray blacks/Latinos, but the actual number count is much closer. And that's the problem with a 18 person sample size, inaccurate results, which is why this video shouldn't be treated like a survey.

So, by dude's admission, he had usable footage of 30-40 incidents, which was edited down to the video we saw. We don't know the ethnicity of the people whose takes weren't usable and we don't know the ethnicity of the people he decided to cut. We do know the ethnicity of the people he decided to include and particularly the two he chose to highlight, and the impression formed about the video from that decision. So yes, we do know that he edited dudes out, and even if you carry the actual demographics of the guys in the video over to the ones who were cut as opposed to the impact demographics, you can extrapolate that a significant number of them were white. At a bare minimum, it's unlikely to me anyway that ALL of them were non-white.

thanks for posting that DJP, i didn't know that there were more extensive comments available (don't think Slate linked to them)

how was the camera set up? it also stands to reason that they missed the white guys in their shot because they were out there to capture footage that fit their assumptions and never really aimed the camera at white men

it was literally fixed on a backpack, so no

lol

this shit goes deeper than benghazi

(that is a joke btw)

B
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Also I can even walk you through it, but there were 6 or 7 white guys in this video that catcalled, that's 33% to 40% percent.
Z
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you jest, but I have actually seen internet comments to the effect of accusing the video of having been faked

but can you PROVE that it hasn't? because unless you can prove with 100% certainty that *death by tomato pelting*

hahaha

the meter was redefined so that the speed of light, stated as 299,792,458 m/s, is 100% accurate, i.e. there are no more significant digits. We only need to redefine '100% racist' wrt this video to be certain that the video is '100% racist'. in other news, there are now halloween costumes that are 2 million % racist.

I saw this one comment that was like "I used to work in a TV news crew and I know for a fact that there is no way to get that steady a shot with a hidden camera, you need a very expensive device called a STEADICAM."

Think it's a pretty standard post-processing techinque to be able to minimize camera shake

U can post process that shit

uh sorry 龜. zing touch.

yeah also I kind of wanted to say "maybe tech has changed a bit since you worked in tv news old man"

it sounds like he went to Tech Day and maybe believed everything that the representative from Steadicam Corp told him

Well, there's this:
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2014/10/is-catcalling-racist-harrassment/

(misleading URL btw)

Hey, as long as it's a slow day in this thread :/ ... seems this play (and the two segments to follow) might constitute an important epic in our epoch. I'm seeing it in a couple weeks:

http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/theater-review-father-comes-home-from-the-wars.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/theater/father-comes-home-from-the-wars-by-suzan-lori-parks-at-the-public-theater.html

This sounds fascinating and so wholly dependent upon cast/director synergy in order to work that I can't imagine it being performed after this initial run.

Well, I saw the play she won the Pulitzer for about 12 (gasp) years ago, and I don't know if it's had much of a touring / collegiate life? Mos Def was in it.

I'd semi-expect it could transfer to Broadway once this sold-out run is over, but even August Wilson's plays were pretty spotty in that regard, and things are significantly worse for original plays w/out movie stars there now.

karl, i feel for you in this thread

Gradient Lair and Racalicious and Crunk Feminist Collective

All of the above plus bad dominicana,she is the bossssss

sorry to reopen a can of worms, but i wanted to put this set of tweets in here but i couldn't find them again until now:

https://twitter.com/tgirlinterruptd/status/527489366935875584

seen together with this nonsense:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/10/31/do-we-need-a-law-against-catcalling/street-harassment-law-would-restrict-intimidating-behavior

yet another instance where Official Feminism/Liberalism need to think a little harder about law enforcement

that would be a very, very difficult law to draft reasonably

Criminalization is a terrible failure of an idea, not least because when has criminalizing something ever changed the conditions that lead to it happening?? Plus the obvious racialized costs via the overpolicing of Black & brown people and communities that I've already talked about above.

I'm really hoping that the Hb video has been SO BADLY received in some sectors that it will force a confrontation with SSH and Hb's horrible race politics and slow down/stop the move to legislate against street harassment.

Yeah the last thing police need is another law in their toolbox

I'm just amazed at Hb and Holly Kearl at SSH for their absolute deafness and refusal to engage with Black women/WoC activists about...well anything really. It's just like, why don't you just make a public statement about who your work really is and is not for?? They're not even sorry.

Brittney Cooper from Crunk Feminist Collective playing nice on Chris Hayes the oth night btw, acknowledging the flawed race critique of the video but prioritizing the experiences of all women with SH. HOWEVER I think a Black woman has the required license to make that call--calling on Black men to see the natural relationship between police harassment and gendered street harassment, that both are a revocation of one's rights to a public life, to be a body in public space.

When white women activists try to do that, the effect is to erase Black men's experiences with overpolicing & police brutality and replace them with a store in which ww are the victims (often of Black & brown men, again, in this continuing narrative). But hell, Brittney Cooper can do whatever the hell she wants.

*replace them with a storY

it's a sephora store tho

Well that changes everything.

That entire stream of tweets was a great read.

Oh yeah that was righteous. Then I read the opinion pieces and got distracted by how disgusted I was.

Anything worth bookmarking? I should actually be doing some work today

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh (dear jesus please let me have spelled that correctly) wrote one that was good but could have used even stronger language. The others, not so as you'd notice.

tyty

Okay the ACLU dude was good on the points, now that I went back and read his. The two white women who contributed were abysmal and really embarrassing, unfortunately.

the ACLU guy's points about the negative effects laws like the ones being advocated could have were well worth reading

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/03/jeff-chang-who-we-be_n_6081320.html

Good read, Jeff Chang's the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop which I remember more than a few ilxors love

aaaah I hadn't clicked on the NYT link and didn't realize all four of the pieces under discussion were in one place; I was sitting here half-seriously thinking "why does everyone besides me magically know where to find these things oh wait I might be doing something dumb here"

just for posterity's sake

https://twitter.com/annamilton/status/529067160778575872

Hahaha yessss

awesome